Best Practices for Accounting Integrations: Strategy and Control

Associations today depend on a growing number of transactional systems such as AMS, event registration, fundraising, and eCommerce platforms to manage revenue and member activity.  Each system serves its own business purpose, but without a properly designed integration strategy, this web of data can leave finance teams with a fragmented view of the organization’s sales activity.  Transactions must ultimately converge in the general ledger, and poorly designed accounting system integrations can create gaps that undermine that process.

This article focuses on the development of accounting integrations — the connections that bring data from sub-ledger systems into the general ledger in a way that supports accurate reporting and reconciliation.  A common misstep in embarking on these projects is assuming that development partners, even seasoned integration teams, understand how data should flow across accounting systems.  That assumption often leads to poorly conceived designs, resulting in rework, inconsistent reporting, inefficient processes, and even downstream corrective adjustments.  As discussed in Strengthening Collaboration Between Association Accounting and IT, accounting system integrations are best approached from the premise that they are finance projects delivered through technology, with finance and IT working as partners to achieve the outcome.

This article, the first of two, covers the strategic and control foundations of accounting system integration development.  The second installment will address execution and long-term sustainability.

Define Scope with Accounting Requirements First

An integration delivers value only if it reliably records audit-ready entries in the general ledger.  Scope should be defined by accounting requirements, not simply by what data is available from an API endpoint.

At the outset, finance leaders should specify the categories of requirements the integration must support. These typically include:

• Reporting requirements: such as deferred revenue roll-forwards, A/R aging, event profitability reports, and reconciliation schedules.

• Revenue recognition rules: when and how revenue is earned versus deferred.

• Accounts receivable treatment: whether, and at what point, the integration should create A/R entries for unpaid commitments. Related challenges are explored further in Modernizing A/R Reporting and Reconciliation for Associations.

• GL mapping and dimensions: how products, events, and memberships map to accounts and reporting dimensions.  This is addressed in more detail in the section below.

• Fiscal calendar considerations: alignment with fiscal year definitions and the timing of period closes to ensure integrations respect locked periods.

• Other accounting treatments: handling of intercompany transactions, payment processing fees, sales tax payables, chapter dues distributions, and similar details that materially affect journal entries.

Once these requirements are defined, the next step is to determine how transactions should flow into the GL.  Here, one of the most crucial design decisions, and one that is often overlooked, is the posting schedule and grouping rules.  Not every transaction stream needs to post with the same timing or in the same structure.  For example, cash receipts and orders are often best posted daily so they can be reconciled against credit card statements and bank deposits.  Revenue recognition, on the other hand, is typically applied on a monthly basis to align with financial reporting.  The goal is to design posting rules that balance operational reconciliation needs with accounting requirements, avoiding both unnecessary volume and gaps in traceability.

Standardize Mapping and Define Key Fields with Precision

Consistency in mapping and precision in field definitions are fundamental to integration design.

Every product, event, or membership type should be linked to the correct GL accounts and reporting dimensions.  Payment types such as credit cards, checks, and refunds should also be mapped consistently to the appropriate accounts to ensure accurate cash and liability reporting.  Taxes, discounts, and adjustments should follow standard rules.  Exceptions are sometimes unavoidable but should be documented and controlled rather than left to individual judgment.

Every field has a specific role within its source system, but definitions are not always consistent across platforms.  The date that drives revenue recognition may be labeled batch date in one platform and effective date in another.  A thoughtful integration design harmonizes these differences by establishing which fields are authoritative for accounting purposes.  Otherwise, the timing or even the amounts of entries can be misstated, creating reconciliation challenges and undermining financial reporting.  

Establish Reconciliation Principles and Traceability

Reconciliation should be built into the design, not added after the fact.  Accounting system integrations need to produce balances in the general ledger that can be reconciled to the originating sub-ledger transaction systems.  

Common reconciliations include:

• Deferred revenue to unearned revenue balances.

• Orders to billed revenue.

• Cash deposits to recorded payments.

Modern integrations should offer two-way traceability.  Finance teams need to drill down from general ledger balances to sub-ledger transactions, and also roll up from individual transactions back to the GL.  This two-way link creates a clear audit trail and ensures confidence in both high-level reporting and transaction-level details.

For more on the unique complexities of reconciliation in associations, see Why Reconciliation is More Complex for Associations — and How to Fix It.

Account for System Strengths and Shortcomings

A solid integration design needs to account for both the strengths and the shortcomings of the systems being connected.  Part of this evaluation is understanding the internal controls in each system and how they affect the reliability of the data flowing into the general ledger.

Some commerce systems allow transaction record edits after completion, such as changing prices, adding lines, or back-dating adjustments on a fulfilled order.  Without safeguards, those changes can slip into the financials unnoticed.

Accounting integrations with record versioning help to mitigate these shortcomings by preserving the state and history of material data changes (such as amounts, statuses, and dates) within the integration platform. With versioning, reconciliations and audits can follow the actual sequence of events rather than being limited to the latest record.

SoundPost Bridge in Practice

SoundPost Bridge was designed on these principles.  It generates journal entries from a finance-first perspective, with mappings, recognition rules, and dimensions defined up front.

Bridge enforces reconciliation discipline, enabling finance teams to trace general ledger balances directly to their source transactions. And with record versioning built into its data model, it preserves the full history of material data changes even when the source system permits edits after completion. For more on this approach, see SoundPost Bridge: Automating Association Accounting at Scale.

Closing Notes

The strength of an association’s financial reporting largely rests on the quality of its integrations.  When designed with accounting requirements at the core, integrations not only eliminate manual work but also safeguard auditability, reinforce governance, and provide confidence in reported results.  By contrast, poorly conceived integrations create rework, delays, and unreliable reporting.  Sound design makes integrations a strategic asset for finance leaders by enabling faster closes, cleaner reconciliations, and clearer insights for decision-making.